COLOSSAL CLASSROOM ADVENTURE: DEVELOPING INTERACTIVE FICTION FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS BY ALEXIS KIM THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Master’s Committee: Professor Randall Sadler, Chair Professor Judith Pintar ABSTRACT The purpose of this project is an act of exploratory research to develop a text based interactive adventure for non-native English speakers to hone their extensive reading skills in American English. The history of text based gaming will be used to establish a guide over the potential pitfalls unique to the genre. Then the uses of games in an educational context will be established to show the differences in teacher motivation toward the creation and use of gaming in education. Second Language Acquisition and ESL reading specific research will be used to create a set of guidelines for the text and presentation in the game. Details of the game are presented to detail the plot, educational justification and technical specs. Finally, I will explore how this information could be used to assist teachers in the game creation process. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTERACTIVE FICTION AND TEXT GAMES ................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: EDUTAINMENT, EDUCATIONAL GAMES, AND GAMIFICATION ............... 7 CHAPTER 3: ESL TEACHINGS: OVERVIEW AND GAMING CONNECTIONS .................. 11 CHAPTER 4: CINEMA ADVENTURE ....................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER 5: MOVING FORWARD ........................................................................................... 29 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................. 31 APPENDIX A: SOURCE CODE .................................................................................................. 39 APPENDIX B: WALKTHROUGH TRANSCRIPT ..................................................................... 87 APPENDIX C: VOCABULARY LIST ....................................................................................... 102 iii CHAPTER 1: INTERACTIVE FICTION AND TEXT GAMES Gaming Play is an intrinsically motivated, voluntary set of actions that focus on recreation or enjoyment (Oxford, n.d.; Gray, 2008). Play and games are two close concepts; games being an extension of play with stricter structure, like rules and other boundaries (Piaget, 1951; Vygotsky, 1967). Think of the difference between: “children playing outside” and “children playing games outside”, the latter might conjure up a more specific vision of children involved in a game of croquet or tag, while the former may include these activities or just running through a sprinkler, an activity that is enjoyable, but may not be structured. The concept of a game is very broad and can apply to computer/video games (henceforth, collectively referred to as “video games” for brevity’s sake); board games, like monopoly or tabletop RPGs (Role Playing Games) like Dungeons and Dragons, even sports. This paper will outline the plan and development of a video game suited for English language learning. It’s worth noting, that although you may have little experience with video games, you have likely had some prior experience playing “games”. These experiences present relevance in understanding the purpose, play and application of video game. “Gaming” is even more specific than play or games and has come to mean the involvement in playing video games (Technopedia, n.d.). A gamer is the person that participates in gaming, usually video gaming. Unlike table top and board games which default to “playing games” or qualifiers like “tabletop gaming” (rather than just “gaming”), gaming implies that there is a device, often electronic, used to facilitate the gameplay (Ray, 2012; Technopedia, n.d.; Tse, Greenberg, Shen, & Forlines, 2007). This is not to be confused with gaming’s other definition which is the play of gambling games; this definition is used in law and can be seen in patents (University of Nevada Las Vegas). This paper will refer to gaming exclusively to refer to the act of playing non-gambling video games. From Text to Graphics A text based game is a game that utilizes text characters rather than graphics to represent an environment (Curtis, 1992). The use of text to represent images, dialogue and description was made 1 necessary by limitations of computers in the 1970s and 1980s, when these types of games began to emerge on the market. Early examples of text based adventure games include Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. These particular text based adventures are synonymous with Interactive Fiction, discussed more extensively in the next section. Figure 1. Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork Gameplay. This is an example of early text adventure games running in a DOS environment. Text based gaming got its start in the 1970s, where games were more commonly developed by programmers or others established in Information Technology. At this time, programming for a hobby was not as common as it is today and playing games on a home computer was nearly unheard of in a burgeoning but costly market (Computer History Museum, n.d.; Domingo, 2011). An exception to this may be found in those that purchased Atari home computers and found it necessary to learn to program to increase their gaming library (Lendino, 2017; Macklin, 2018). Games of this time could be said to contain a certain charm and allowed a new sense of engagement that movies or books could not match, by letting the player explore and influence the game’s progression. Concealed behind deceivingly simplistic interfaces lie unforgiving environments with, at times, sets of illogical or convoluted solutions. Game designer and producer Ron Gilbert explained in his original 1989 treatise Why Adventure Games Suck, “What makes most games tough to play is that the puzzles are arbitrary and unconnected.”. Instead, games should work on bellowing rules and being consistent. If they don't encourage immersion, Gilbert argued, they fall flat (2004). However, for early adventure games, these rifts in a fundamental aspect of 2 adventure game design would be overlooked while technological developments helped to pave the way for more immersive spaces. By the 1980s, text based games still had a market share; but with the advent of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and the expansion of the home computer market, games were being played by a wider audience and they were becoming punctuated by graphics, animation, and sound. At the time, arcades were a widespread source of pay-to-play entertainment for the masses. After the great video game crash in ‘83, fourth and fifth generation home console makers Nintendo, Sega, and Neo Geo rose from the ashes to port various arcade games (along with original content) that allowed television owners to play their favorite games, albeit often with some changes to account for hardware limitations. This, along with increasing home computer ownership meant that more people had access to video games (United States Census Bureau, 2016). Since puzzles could not be difficult simply for the sake of eating up quarters, companies devised other ways to charge for the sometimes absurdly obscure solutions to in-game puzzles (Ray, 2012). What followed was the development of help hotlines and magazines, like Nintendo Power, that players paid for to reveal secret areas and hints for solving puzzles. The 1990s were something of a Golden Age for adventure games, though this classification may be debated by those that hold nostalgia for text-only adventures or another sub-genre. In 1993 alone many noteworthy adventure titles like Myst, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and The 7th Guest were released. All of these games were successful enough to garner sequels or remakes in later years. While the early 1990s saw success in refining what the ideal was for adventure games, the mid 90s is when many experimental techniques, like the addition of Full Motion Video (FMV) were used. Phantasmagoria used actors atop 3D rendered backgrounds to add realistic depth to the genre; later releases, like Tender Loving Care, took Interactive Fiction to a new level, using real actors to play pre-set scenes that were affected by player choice— essentially creating a full length movie in the process. Game budgets were expanded and many studios utilized the success of earlier releases to develop sequels of bestselling Intellectual Properties (IPs). Unfortunately, adventure game designers began to build on increasingly shaky ground. Studios attempted innovation within the genre while outputting less 3 successful games than in the past. This, coupled with increased competition by the emerging shooter market, only added to the causes of the eventual collapse. From the late 1990s to early 2000s text and point-and-click games were on the decline. As consumers were able to purchase better home computing technology, 3D shooters began to take hold of the market, with titles like Goldeneye 007 (1997) and Half-life (1998) being released to rave reviews. Roberta Williams, one of the founders of Sierra Online (now Sierra) and creator of the King’s Quest series addressed this in an interview: [...] back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back